Prince Albert, whose 190th birthday it would be today, never got to see the hall that carries his name, but he would have approved of its industrious, populist eclecticism. No other country has anything like it. Lord Derby, prime minister during its construction, feared that it would "degenerate into a mere place of public amusements of which monster concerts would be the least objectionable" and he was right, except that the concerts turned out to be the Proms and the Royal Albert Hall proved to be one of the most democratic venues in the world, open to anyone who wants to queue and pay £5. Always busy, the great hall has offered space to the most extraordinary array of events: in 1963, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles performed together; it has been home to tennis matches and ballroom dancing, remembrance services and opera (once serving as a fitting Valhalla at the end of a Royal Opera ring cycle). None of it should have happened: the hall was only built thanks to the determination of Henry Cole, who promoted Victorian science and the arts. He battled architects (one of whom was happily deterred from building it "in early Gothic with a touch of Byzantine") and infamously bad acoustics (when they worsened in the 1920s managers blamed "an increase in boiled shirt fronts"). Baffles, installed in 1969, and recent refurbishment have more or less solved the problem: the hall is in its best state ever. What ought to be the largest anachronism of the Victorian age is noisy, happy and full.